Stand on Zanzibar

context (2)

EDITORIAL SLOT

Stock cue VISUAL: cliptage, wholescreen, atmospheric-type, orchestrated, first favouring copter views and MCU’s New Jersey Turnpike Jam 1977 (¾ million cars o/w 16,000-odd had to be crushed in situ) intercut w crush-hour shots Fifth Ave., Oxford St., Red Sq.; later favouring cretins, morons, phocomeli.

Live cue SOUND: “Today we congratulate Puerto Rico on the defeat it’s inflicted on the baby-farming lobby. People who have celebrated their twenty-first find it hard to believe that a mere thirty years ago highways and cities were choked to strangulation point with masses of allegedly moving metal that got in each other’s way so much we finally saw sense. Why worry about two tons of complicated steel gadgetry you won’t need when you get where you’re going—that won’t even get you there in reasonable time? Worse yet—which measurably shortens your life through cancer or bronchitis thanks to the stench it emits!

“Like living creatures, automobiles expired when their environment became saturated with their own excreta. We ourselves are living creatures. We don’t want the same to happen to us. That’s why we have eugenic legislation. Praise the J-but-O State for joining the majority of us who have seen the danger coming and resolved to put up with the minor inconveniences it entails when we decide to control the human elements of the big scene we inhabit.

“This has been a Greater New York Times editorial slot.”

continuity (1)

THE GUILT-EDGED SECURITY

Everything about Norman Niblock House was measured: as measured as a foot-rule, as measured as time. Item the degree to which he allowed himself to lighten his skin and straighten the kinks in his hair and beard, so that he could exploit the guilt-reaction of his colleagues while still managing to get next to the shiggies who did most for his cod. Item the soupçon of eccentricity he manifested in his behaviour, as much as could ordinarily be tolerated in a junior VP of a big corporation and that much over the limit which said he was not a man to trifle with. Item the amount and nature of the work he arranged to have channelled to his office, selected so the visits of other zecks found him engaged in vastly important transactions.

* * *

He had been recruited to the company under the provisions of the Equal Opportunity Act which bound corporations like General Technics to employ the same ratio of whites to Aframs as was found in the country at large, plus or minus five per cent. Unlike some of his intake, he’d been welcome with a sigh of relief by the then vice-president in charge of personnel and recruitment, who had almost given up hope of finding enough Aframs willing to accept the standards of their host society. (A doctorate? What’s a doctorate? A piece of paleass’s toilet-paper.)

Norman N. House, D.Sc., was a prize. Knowing that, he’d made the race to win him long and hard.

Perceptive for the third time in his life (the first time: picking his parents; the second: sideswiping the only other contender for the post he now held down), the VP noticed that his new subordinate had a talent for impressing his personality on people he had never met before and was unlikely to meet again. They said later that he had House style. It meant that while he could bear to forget others he hated the idea that they should forget him.

The VP, envying this talent, took to cultivating Norman House in the hope that some of it might rub off on him. The hope was unfounded. Either a man is born with the gift or he learns it by conscious application over twenty years. Norman was then twenty-six and had been applying himself for the requisite two decades.

But the VP was tossed a few glib, helpful snippets.

“What I think of him? Well, his papers are good” (spoken judiciously, willing to make allowances) “but to my mind the man who has to wear MasQ-Lines is basically unsure of his own competence. They pad the frontal area, you know.”

The VP, who had six pairs, never wore them again.

“What do I think of her? Well, she profiles okay on the testing sheet, but to my mind any girl who wears a Forlon&Morler Maxess top over a pair of impervious slax is the type who won’t go through with what she starts.”

The VP, who had invited her to dinner and expected to be paid in the current contemporary coin, excused himself on grounds of imaginary illness and went grumpily home to his wife for the night.

“What I think of the annual report? Well, the graphing is up on last year’s, but the noise level generated by this operation suggests it could be fifteen to eighteen per cent higher than it is. I’m wondering if it’ll last.”

The VP, who had been dithering, decided to retire at fifty with the Grade One bonus stock issue instead of hanging on to collect the Grade Three entitlement, double the size, due at sixty. He sold the stock as soon as he acquired it and chewed his nails while he watched its value creep up month by month. Eventually he shot himself.

It was his suspicion that the rise of GT stock might be due to his own replacement by Norman which killed him.

* * *

Norman walked briskly towards the general elevator. He declined to use the one that led directly from street-level to the wall behind his desk: “It’s ludicrous for someone who deals with people not to mingle with the people he’s dealing with, isn’t it?”

At least one of the senior VP’s had lately stopped using his private elevator too.

But in any case, he was going up.

Waiting, there was one of the company shiggies. She smiled at him, not because they were acquainted—he preferred to let it be felt that someone who relied on the firm to get him shiggies was less of a man than Norman House—but because the time and effort he invested in trifles like not using a private elevator paid off in the common belief that of all the twenty VP’s in the company the most approachable and sociable was Mr. House. Stockboys toting crates in GT’s West Virginia electronics plant shared the opinion, never having set eyes on him.

The smile he automatically returned was forced. He was edgy. An invitation to take lunch on the presidential floor with the senior zecks might be accounted for in two main ways: there might be promotion in the offing, although the grapevine he assiduously cultivated had brought him no hint of it; or, far more likely, they might be planning yet another review of the staffing system. He had endured two such since inheriting his present job, but they were a nuisance, and sometimes he could not hang on to people he had schemed for months to slot into influential posts.

The hole! I can cope with these paleasses. I did it before.

The descending light of the elevator showed and a soft chime rang out. Norman returned his attention to the here and now. A clock over the door, keyed like all those in the GT tower to the famous critonium master clock, indicated 12–44 poppa-momma. If he let the shiggy take the car down, he’d be a measured minute late for lunch with the Highly Important Personages.

That should be about right.

When the car arrived, he waved the girl past him. “I’m going up,” he told her.

Promotion in the offing or not, he meant it.

* * *

The predicted few moments behind schedule, he emerged on the presidential floor. Synthetic grass hushed under his feet as he walked towards the group gathered alongside the swimming-pool. Four of the shapeliest of the company shiggies were disporting themselves nude in the water. He thought of the recurrent joke question—“Why doesn’t GT pioneer company codders?”—and had trouble masking his amusement as he was greeted by Old GT herself.

Merely by looking at Georgette Tallon Buckfast one could not have guessed she was both an extraordinary person and an extraordinary artifact. One had to be told that she was ninety. She looked at worst sixty: plump, well-favoured, crowned with enough of her own brown hair to belie the old charge that she was more male than female. True, close study of her bosom might reveal the inequality which betrayed her use of a cardiac pacemaker, but nowadays many people wore such accessories by the time they were seventy or even younger. Only intensive prying had led Norman to knowledge of the lung-tissue transplant, the plastic venous valves, the kidney graft, the pinned bones, the vocal cords replaced because of cancer.

According to reliable estimates she was somewhat richer than the British royal family. Wealth like that could buy health, even if only by instalments.

With her were Hamilcar Waterford, the company treasurer, much younger than Old GT but looking older; Rex Foster-Stern, senior VP in charge of projects and planning, a man of Norman’s own height and build who affected Dundreary whiskers and what the Children of X sneeringly termed a “non-partisan tan”; and an Afram whose features had a tantalisingly familiar cast, though he was not someone Norman had seen around the GT tower before—fiftyish, stocky, bald, Kenyatta beard, looking tired.

Norman considered a new explanation for his having been invited to this luncheon. Last time he had encountered a middle-aged stranger at such a function it had been a retired admiral GT was thinking of adding to the board for the sake of his service contacts. He had gone to a hovercraft manufacturer instead, so nothing had come of it. But if this was another of the same, Norman was going to be as insolent as he could manage without jeopardising his career. No kinky-knobbed Uncle Tom was going to be slotted into a high board chair above Norman House.

Then Old GT said, “Elihu, let me introduce Norman House, who’s our VP i/c personnel and recruitment,” and the world shifted to a different axis.

Elihu. Elihu Rodan Masters, career diplomat, U. S. Ambassador to Beninia. But whatinole could GT want with a snake’s-tongue scrap of land like that, stuck wedgewise into Africa with neither skills nor natural resources to be exploited?

There was no time for speculation, though. He put out his hand, cutting short GT’s introduction with the gesture. “No real need to introduce anyone to Mr. Masters, ma’am,” he said briskly. “Someone with his kind of personal distinction is environment-forming for all of us, and I feel I know him well though I never had the chance to shake with him before.”

In Old GT’s face—for a woman who had built herself both a giant corporation and a huge personal fortune, she was surprisingly bad at controlling her expression—Norman could see annoyance at being interrupted struggling with satisfaction at the prettiness of the compliment.

“Drink?” she said finally, the latter winning out.

“No thanks, ma’am,” Norman answered. “It’s against the word of the Prophet, you know.”

Beninia, hm? Something to do with opening an African market for MAMP? Over half a billion bucks tied up in that, and no place to sell the produce of the richest mineral strike since Siberia—it can’t go on. But Beninia can’t even afford to feed its own population from what I hear …

Plainly embarrassed at having forgotten or not known that one of her own VP’s was a Muslim, Old GT took refuge in testiness. The House style was proof against that. Pleased with the turn the talk was taking, extremely aware of Master’s eyes on him, Norman thoroughly enjoyed the ten minutes of conversation which preluded their adjournment to table. In fact he took it so much for granted that the buzz of the phone a minute or two after one o’clock was to herald the serving of the meal that he continued with the story he’d been telling—a mild anti-Afram joke suitable for mixed company, well salted with the derogatory term “brown-nose”—until GT shouted at him the second time.

“House! House! There’s trouble with a gang of visitors being shown over Shalmaneser! On your orbit, isn’t it?”

Preserving his exterior calm by reflex, Norman rose from his polychair.

If this is something they’ve laid on to screw me, I’ll give them dreck for dinner. I’ll—

“Forgive me, Mr. Masters,” he said in a slightly bored tone. “I’ll only be a minute or two, I’m sure.”

And headed for the elevator, seething.

tracking with closeups (2)

YONDERBOY

“Talk about launch windows all it means some pudding-hole zeck knotted his strings Shalmaneser-pizzleteaser whyinole waste the time come all this way to New York better weather even without a dome fit to freeze your cod off in here better shiggies wearing less and better pot to cap the lot eight today already here it is not yet one poppa-momma and hardly a heist in a haywagon”

* * *

Inside the vault housing Shalmaneser: cool. Waiting for the launch window, which is a decorative way of saying when the GT guide is good and ready to start, this fact has already decided several of the crowd one hundred nine strong (some of whom are tourists some of whom are genuine potential recruits lured by the handouts and TV plugs of the GT Corp. some of whom have seen themselves here so often in the personae of Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere that they couldn’t tell you why they bothered to make the visit in reality and some of whom are GT’s own plantees primed to speak up at the right moments and give the impression of Things Happening) that they aren’t going to be interested in what they’re shown. Cold! In May! Under the Manhattan Fuller Dome! And clad in Nydofoam sneakers, MasQ-Lines, Forlon&Morler skirtlets and dresslets; strung about with Japind Holocams with Biltin g’teed Norisk LazeeLaser monochrome lamps, instreplay SeeyanEar recorders; pocket-heavy with Japind Jettiguns, SeKure Stunnems, Karatands to be slipped on as easily as your grandmother drew on her glove.

Uneasy, watching their accidental companions on this guided tour.

Well-fed.

Shifty-eyed, slipping tranks into their chomp-chomp jaws.

Damned good-looking.

Thinking that any one of these crowding-near neighbours could be a mucker.

The New Poor of the happening world.

* * *

Stal Lucas didn’t like the way the guide looked over the party when he finally deigned to show. Someone looking over that many people wouldn’t notice Stal Lucas, individual: age twenty, height six, wearing SirFer S-Pad-Drills, Mogul slax and a freeflying Blood Onyx shirjack with real gold fastener tags.

He’d see, rather, a vaguely milling bunch of misfits, vagabonds and pseudos, out of which some subgroups could be separated. Like Stal and his sparewheels from California, in New York on a two-night-one-day Jettex Cursion for the lift and not getting any. The world shrunk so tight you couldn’t pull it on over your shoes and still this distancing effect between the coasts …

On the entire one hundred and nine, there were four shiggies to fine-focus: one orbiting, probably by now ignorant not only of what building she was in but of what astral plane she was inhabiting; two with codders they hung to the arms of undetachablike; one like she just blew in from RUNG with African hair and bilberry skin which it wouldn’t do for Stal to be seen counting down with.

The rest were so drecky it was hard to believe, going right down to one in a shapeless brown bag of a garment toting a big heavy sacking purse, hair cropped to a crewcut, nervous face shiny except where it was chapped or spotted—a Divine Daughter, probably. Nothing short of religion could persuade a normal girl to make herself look so awful.

“Whereinole the shiggies?” Stal said half under his breath. In company jobs, of course. Of all the megalopoli New York ate most and paid best. Same problem Ellayway, though there the hirer was government, drecking the draftees to the Pacific Conflict Zone, but who’s richer than a government?

So kill time. So put up with this sheeting notion of being dragged around a cold vault. So wait until tomorrow anti-matter when the plane will take Stal and sparewheels back to love on her and oh Bay.

“Where they keep Teresa, say?” muttered Zink Hodes, sparewheel nearest to Stal. He alluded to Shalmaneser’s legendary girl-friend, source of endless dirty jokes. Stal didn’t deign to reply. Zink had gone storehopping last night and was wearing a Nytype outfit. Stal was unpleased.

A couple up ahead with not one or two but count ’em three prodgies trailing along: embarrassed at the attention they attracted from envious neighbours in the crowd, explaining in loud voices that the three weren’t all theirs but they were taking a cousin’s appleofmyeye out for the day as well as their own two, mollifying the people around them but not so readily that they weren’t the last to shush when the guide finally called the visitors towards him.

“Good afternoon and welcome to the General Technics tower. I don’t have to tell anyone about GT—”

“So why you don’t get the mouth sewn shut?” whispered Zink.

“—because it’s environment-forming for everyone in this hemisphere and even beyond, from Moonbase Zero to the Mid-Atlantic Mining Project on the deep ocean floor. But there’s one element of our manifold operations which always fascinates you, Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere, and that’s what you’re going to be shown.”

“He should fascinate good and tight, such as weld it,” Zink said.

Stal cracked fingers at the two other sparewheels a pace distant and gestured they should shut Zink in from both sides.

“Leave you behind,” Stal said. “Nylover. Or get on that plane we put you out at thirty thousand, no ass-padding for you land.”

“But I—”

“Fascinate,” Stal said, and Zink complied, eyes round with dismay.

“Notice the granite slab you’re passing under with the lettering engraved by GT’s high-precision explosive forming process. They said nobody could work natural stone explosively so we went ahead and did it, thus bearing out the company motto at the head of the list.”

A dropout near Stal moved lips in an audible whisper as he struggled to interpret the obliquely viewed writing.

“Underneath are listed prime examples of human shortsightedness, like you’ll see it’s impossible for men to breathe at over thirty miles an hour, and a bumblebee cannot possibly fly, and interplanetary spaces are God’s quarantine regulations. Try telling the folk at Moonbase Zero about that!”

A few sycophantic laughs. Several places ahead of Stal the Divine Daughter crossed herself at the Name.

“Why is it so sheeting cold in here?” yelled someone up the front near the guide.

“If you were wearing GT’s new Polyclime fabrics, like me, you wouldn’t feel it,” the guide responded promptly.

Drecky plantees, yet. How much of this crowd are GT staff members hired by government order and kept hanging about on makeweight jobs for want of anything better to do?

“But that cues me in to another prime instance of how wrong can you be? Seventy or eighty years back they were saying to build a computer to match a human brain would take a skyscraper to house it and Niagara Falls to cool it. Well, that’s not up on the slab there because they were only half wrong about the cooling bit—in fact Niagara Falls wouldn’t do, it’s not cold enough. We use liquid helium by the ton load. But they were sheeting wrong about the skyscraper. Spread around this balcony and I’ll show you why.”

Passive, the hundred and nine filed around a horseshoe gallery overlooking the chill sliced-egg volume of the vault. Below on the main floor identical-looking men and women came and went, occasionally glancing upwards with an air of incuriosity. Resentful, another score or so of the hundred and nine decided they weren’t going to be interested no matter what.

Stal remained in two minds. His eyes darted across the equipment laid out below. There was eighty or ninety feet of it, at least—cables, piping, keyboards, readins and readouts, state-of-action banks, shelving loaded with gleaming metal oddments.

“It’s pretty big even if it doesn’t use a whole skyscraper,” someone called. Another drecky plantee, doubtless. Stal refrained from objecting when Zink scuffed his feet noisily.

“Wrong,” the guide said, and swivelled a spotlight head-high beside him. The beam leapfrogged over machinery and people and came to rest on an unimpressive frustrum of dull white metal.

“That,” he said solemnly, “is Shalmaneser.”

“That thing?” the plantee exclaimed dutifully.

“That thing. Eighteen inches high, diameter at the base eleven inches, and it’s the world’s largest computer thanks to GT’s unique patented and registered system known as Micryogenics. In fact it’s the first computer estimated to fall in the megabrain range!”

“That’s a damned lie,” someone up the front said.

Thrown out of orbit, the guide hesitated.

“What about K’ung-fu-tse?” the someone went on.

“What? I’m afraid I don’t—” The guide gave a meaningless smile. This wasn’t an interruption by a plantee, Stal concluded, and raised on tiptoe to see what was happening.

“Confucius! You’d say Confucius! At the University of Peking they’ve had a megabrain computer in operation since—”

“Shut his hole! Traitor! Dirty lying bleeder! Throw him over the side!”

The yells were instant, reflex, automatic. Zink pushed forward and shouted with the others. Stal’s eyes narrowed as he drew a pack of Bay Golds from his pocket and set one at the corner of his mouth. Only four left in the pack, spin them out with some of this Nytype dreck, this son-of-Manhattan-green which was what you could get on this coast. He bit down hard on the automatic aerating tip.

What was so important about what the Chinese did, unless the draft got your balls? Nothing to shout about, for def.

Corporation police dragged the little red brother out before anyone had a chance to do more than punch his head, and the guide, relieved, went back into his standard flight pattern.

“See where I’m focusing the light now? That’s the SCANALYZER input. We feed all the news from every major beam agency through that readin unit. Shalmaneser is the means whereby Engrelay Satelserv can tell us where we are in the happening world.”

“Yes, but surely you don’t operate Shalmaneser just for that,” another plantee said loudly, making Stal squirm in his shirjack.

“Of course not. Shalmaneser’s main task is to achieve the impossible again, a routine undertaking here at GT.” The guide paused for effect. “It has been shown theoretically that with a logical system as complex as Shalmaneser consciousness, self-awareness, will eventually be generated if enough information is fed it. And we can proudly claim that there have already been signs—”

Commotion. Several people pressed forward to get a sight of what was going on, including Zink. Stal stood his ground with a sigh. Another planted distraction was the likeliest. Whyinole should these blocks believe people couldn’t tell a fake event from the real?

But—

“Blasphemers! Devilspawn! Consciousness is the gift of God and you can’t build a soul into a machine!”

—a GT plantee wouldn’t be invited to scream that.

There was a block in his way: some elderly codder inches shorter and pounds lighter than Stal. He shoved him aside and put Zink between himself and recriminations while he leaned over the balcony’s rail. Clambering hand over hand down one of the twenty-foot pillars supporting the gallery was the shiggy in the shapeless brown outfit, jumping the last five feet now and rounding on the alarmed staff as they hurried to intercept her.

“It’s Teresa!” someone shouted, attempting wit, and was answered by a few half-hearted chuckles. But most of the people on the gallery were at once showing signs of fright. Nothing like this had ever happened during a visit by Mr. & Mrs. Everywhere. People who wanted a better view started shoving against people who wanted out, and almost immediately tempers began to rise and voices with them.

Interested, Stal considered and rejected possibilities. No Divine Daughter would carry anything that would work at a safe distance—no bolt-gun, no firearms, no grenades. So the blocks who were shrieking towards the exit or hurling themselves flat on the floor were wasting their energy. On the other hand, there was room in that sack affair slung from her shoulder to hold quite a—

A telescopic axe with a blade the full length of the folded handle. Hmmm!

Screaming: “Devil’s work! Smash it and repent before you’re damned to all eternity! Don’t presume to infringe God’s—”

She flung the bag in the face of the nearest machine-tender and charged at Shalmaneser. Some mind-present codder threw a heavy service manual at her and it struck her on the leg, making her stumble and almost fall. In that instant defenders grouped, arming themselves with handleless whips of multicore cable and shelf-struts awaiting installation which made six-foot bludgeons.

But, cowardly, they only circled and didn’t close in. Stal curled his lip in contempt.

“Go it shiggy!” whooped Zink, and Stal didn’t comment. He might have said the same but that it was unbefitting.

A clash of metal on metal resounded through the vault as the girl squared up to the boldest of her opponents, wielding one of the shelf-struts. He yelped and dropped it as if it had stung him and she followed through wildly with the axe.

His hand—Stal saw it clearly in mid-flight—looped free in the air like a shuttlecock and there was blood on the axe’s blade.

“Hey-hey,” he said under his breath, and leaned another two inches over the balcony rail.

From behind her someone else lashed out with a length of cable, leaving a red brand across her cheek and neck. She flinched but disregarded the pain and slammed the axe down on one of the readin tables. It shattered into fragments of plastic and bright little electronic parts.

“Hey-hey,” Stal repeated with a little more enthusiasm. “Who next?”

“Let’s us all go out this evening and raise a little whaledreck,” Zink proposed excitedly. “I didn’t see a shiggy with this much offyourass in years!”

The girl dodged another onslaught and seized something from a trolley with her left hand. She hurled it in the direction of Shalmaneser and a flurry of sparks marked the impact.

Stal considered Zink’s proposal thoughtfully, inclined to agree. The blood from the axe had spattered the girl’s brown clothing and the injured man was lying howling on the floor.

He sucked at the tip of his Bay Gold, feeling decision gather as the smoke automatically diluted with four parts of air swirled into his lungs. But he was still holding it there—he could hold it for ninety seconds without trouble—when the sceneshifter moved in.